One of the
most important practical results of a thorough comprehension of Theosophical
truth is the entire change which is necessary brings about in our attitude towards
death. It is impossible for us to calculate the vast amount of utterly
unnecessary sorrow and terror and misery which mankind in the aggregate has
suffered simply from its ignorance and superstition with regard to this one
matter of death. There is among us a mass of false and foolish belief along
this line which has worked untold evil in the past and is causing indescribable
suffering in the present, and its eradication would be one of the greatest
benefits that could be conferred upon the human race.

This benefit
the Theosophical teaching at once confers on those who, from their study of
philosophy in past lives, now find themselves able to accept it. It robs death
forthwith of all its terror and much of its sorrow, and enables us to see it in
its true proportions and to understand its place in the scheme of our
evolution.

While death
is considered as the end of life, as the gateway into a dim but fearful unknown
country, it is not unnaturally regarded with much misgiving, if

not with
positive terror. Since, in spite of all religious teaching to the contrary this
has been the view universally taken in the western world, many

grisly
horrors have sprung up around it, and have become matters of custom,
thoughtlessly obeyed by many who should know better.

All the
ghastly paraphernalia of woe – the mutes, the plumes, the black velvet, the
crape, the mourning garments, the black-edged note paper –all these are nothing
more than advertisements of ignorance on the part of those who employ

them. The man
who begins to understand what death is at once puts aside all this masquerade
as childish folly, seeing that to mourn over the good fortune of his friend
merely because it involves for himself the pain of apparent separation from
that friend, becomes, as soon as it is recognised, a display of selfishness.

He cannot
avoid feeling the wrench of the temporary separation, but he can avoid allowing
his own pain to become a hindrance to the friend who has passed on. He knows
that there can be no need to fear or to mourn over death, whether it comes to
himself or to those whom he loves. It has come to them all often before, so
that there is nothing unfamiliar about it. Instead of representing it as a
ghastly king of terrors, it would be more accurate and more sensible to
symbolise it as an angel bearing a golden key to admit us to the glorious
realms of the higher life.

He realises
very definitely that life is continuous, and that the loss of the physical body
is nothing more than the casting aside of a garment which in no way changes the
real man who is the wearer of the garment. He sees that death is simply a
promotion from a life which is more than half-physical to one which is wholly
astral, and therefore very much superior.

So, for
himself he unfeignedly welcomes it, and when it comes to those whom he loves,
he recognises at once the great advantage for them, even though he cannot feel
a certain amount of selfish regret that he should be temporarily separated from
them.

But he knows
also that this separation is in fact only apparent, and not real. He knows that
the so-called dead are near him still, and that he has only to cast off
temporarily his physical body in sleep, in order to stand side by side with
them and commune with them as before.He
sees clearly that the world is one and that the same Divine laws rule the whole
of it, whether it be visible or invisible to the physical sight. Consequently
he has no feeling of nervousness or strangeness in passing from one part of it
to the other, and no sort of uncertainty as to what he will find on the other
side of the veil.

The whole of
the unseen world is so clearly and fully mapped out for himthrough the work of
the Theosophical investigators that it is well known to him as the physical
life, and thus he is prepared to enter upon it without hesitation whenever it
may be best for his evolution. For full details of the various stages of this
higher life we must refer the reader to the books specially devoted to this
subject. It is sufficient here to say that the conditions into which the man
passes are precisely those which the man passes are precisely those which he
has made for himself. The thoughts and desires which he has encouraged within
himself during earth-life take form as definite living entities hovering round
him and reacting upon him until the energy which he poured into them is
exhausted.

When such
thoughts and desires have been powerful and persistently evil, the companions so
created may indeed be terrible; but happily such cases form a very small
minority among the dwellers in the astral world. The worst that the

ordinary man
of the world usually provides for himself after death is a useless and
unutterably wearisome existence, void of all rational interests – the natural
sequence of a life wasted in self-indulgence, triviality, and gossip here on
earth.

To this
weariness active suffering may under certain conditions be added. If a man
during earth-life has allowed strong physical desire to obtain a mastery over
him – if, for example, he has become a slave to such a vice as avarice,
sensuality, or drunkenness – he has laid up for himself much purgatorial
suffering after death. For in losing the physical body he in no way loses these
desires and passions; they remain as vivid as ever – nay, they are even more
active when they have no longer the heavy particles of dense matter to set in
motion.

What he does
lose is the power to gratify these passions; so that they remain as torturing,
gnawing desires, unsatisfied and unsatisfiable. It will be

seen that
this makes a very real hell for the unfortunate man, though of course only a
temporary one, since in process of time such desires must burn themselves out,
expending their energy in the very suffering which they produce.

A terrible
fate, truly; yet there are two points which we should bear in mind with regard
to it. First, that the man has not only brought it on himself, but has
determined its intensity and it duration for himself. He has allowed this

desire to
reach a certain strength during earth-life, and now he has to meet it and
control it.

If during
physical life he has made efforts to repress or check it, he will have just so
much the less difficulty in conquering it now. He has

created for
himself the monster with which now he has to struggle; whatever strength his
antagonist possesses is just what he has given it. Therefore, his fate is not
imposed upon him from without, but is simply of his own making.

Secondly, the
suffering which he thus brings upon himself is the only way of escape for him.
If it were possible for him to avoid it, and to pass through the astral life
without this gradual wearing away of the lower desires, what would be the
result?

Obviously that
he would enter upon his next physical life entirely under the domination of
these passions. He would be a born drunkard, a sensualist, a miser; and long
before it would be possible to teach him that he ought to try to control such
passions they would have grown far too strong for control – they would have
enslaved him, body and soul, and so another life would be thrown away, another
opportunity would be lost. He would enter thus upon a vicious circle from which
there appears no escape, and his evolution would be indefinitely delayed.

The Divine
scheme is not thus defective.The
passion exhausts itself during the astral life, and the man returns to physical
existence without it. True, the weakness of mind which allowed passion to
dominate him is still there; true also, he has made for himself for this new
life an astral body capable of expressing exactly the same passions as before,
so that it would not be difficult for him to resume his old evil life. But the
ego, the real man, has had a terrible lesson, and assuredly he will make every
effort to prevent his lower manifestation from repeating that mistake, from
falling again under the sway of that passion.

He has still
the germs of it within him, but if he has deserved good and wise parents they
will help to develop the good in him and check the evil, the germs will remain
unfructified and will atrophy, and so in the next life after that they will not
appear at all.So by slow degrees man
conquers his evil qualities, and evolves virtues to replace them.

On the other
hand, the man who is intelligent and helpful, who understands the conditions of
this non-physical existence and takes the rouble to adapt himself to them and
make the most of them, opening before him a splendid vista of

opportunities
both for acquiring fresh knowledge and for doing useful work. He discovers that
life away from this dense body has a vividness and brilliancy to which all
earthly enjoyment is as moonlight unto sunlight, and that through his

clear
knowledge and calm confidence the power of the endless life shines out upon all
those around him.

He may become
a centre of peace and joy unspeakable to hundreds of his fellow men, and may do
more good in a few years of that astral existence than ever he could have done
in the longest physical life.He is well
aware too, that there lies before him another and still grander stage of this
wonderful post-mortem life. Just as by his desires and his lower thoughts he
has made for himself the surroundings of his astral life, so has he by his higher
thought and his nobler aspirations made for himself a life in the heaven-world.

For heaven is
not a dream, but a living and glorious reality. Not a city far away beyond the
stars, with gates of pearl and streets of gold, reserved for the habitation of
a favoured few, but a state of consciousness into which every man

will pass
during the interval between lives on earth. Not an eternal abiding-placetruly, but a condition of bliss indescribable
lasting through many centuries. Not even that alone. For although it contains
the reality which underlies all the best and most spiritual ideas of heaven
which havebeen propounded in various
religions, yet it must by no means be considered from that view only.

It is a realm
of nature which is of exceeding importance to us – a vast and splendid world of
vivid life in which we are living now, as well as in the periods intervening
between physical incarnations. It is only our lack of development , only the limitation
imposed upon us by this robe of flesh, that prevents us from fully realising
that all glory of the brightest heaven is about us here and now, and that
influences flowing from that world are ever playing upon us, if we will only
understand and receive them.

Impossible as
this may seem to the man of the world, it is the plainest of realitiesto the occultist; and to those who have not
yet grasped this

fundamental
truth we can but repeat the advice given by the Buddhist teacher: - “Do not
complain and cry and pray, but open your eyes and see.” The light is all about
you, if you would only cast the bandage from your eyes and look. It is so

wonderful, so
beautiful, so far beyond what any man has dreamt of or prayed for, and it is
for ever and ever.” (“The Soul of the People “, p. 163).

When the
astral body, which is the vehicle of the lower thought and desire, has
gradually been worn away and left behind, the man finds himself inhabiting that
higher vehicle of finer matter which we have called the mental body. In this
vehicle he is able to respond to the vibrations which reach him from the
corresponding matter in the external world – the matter of the mental plane.

His time of
purgatory is over, the lower part of his nature has burnt itself away, and now
there remain only the higher thoughts and aspirations which he has poured forth
during earth-life.

These cluster
round him, through the medium of which he is able to respond to certain types
of vibration in this refinedmatter.
These thoughts which surround him are the powers by which he draws upon the
wealth of the heaven world. This mental plane is a reflection of the Divine
Mind – a storehouse of infinite extent from which the person enjoying heaven is
able to draw just according to the power of his own thoughts and aspirations
generated during the physical and astral life.

All religions
have spoken of the bliss of Heaven, yet few of them have put before us with
sufficient clearness this leading idea which alone explains

rationally
how for all alike such bliss is possible – which is, the keynote of the
conception – the fact that each man makes his own heaven by selection from the
ineffable splendours of the Thought of God Himself. A man decides for himself
both the length and the character of his heaven-life by the causes which he
himself generates during his earth-life; therefore, he cannot but have exactly
the amountwhich he has deserved and
exactly the quality of joy which is best suited to his idiosyncrasies.

This is a
world in which every being must, from the very fact of his consciousness there,
be enjoying the highest spiritual bliss of which he is capable – a world whose
power of response to his aspirations is limited only by his capacity to aspire.
Further details as to the astral life will be found in the Astral Plane; the
heaven life is described in The Devachanic Plane, and information about both is
also given in Death and After,and in
The Other Sideof Death.